About Us

AmericanScience began as "News and Views," with the sponsorship of the Forum for the History of Science in America (FHSA), an interest group within the History of Science Society. Now a team blog, AmericanScience features posts contributed by four early-career historians of science, as follows:

*********************

Leah Aronowsky

Leah originally hails from snowy upstate New York, but was a denizen of New York City proper for several years before joining the history of science graduate program at Harvard. She is currently in the nascent stages of a dissertation on the history of American biology in the nuclear age. She hopes her project will speak to issues in environmental history, history of science and empire, and animal studies (topics she hopes to cover as a blogger at this site). When not holed up in the library, Leah spends her time looking at art, doing yoga, and trying to find ways to improve her surf skills whilst living on the east coast.

Evan Hepler-Smith

Evan is a historian of modern science and technology with research interests in the histories of the chemical sciences, scientific data and information systems, and technologies of art conservation and analysis. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the Princeton University Program in History of Science, where he is working on a dissertation on the history of systematic chemical nomenclature and the many uses of chemical names and notation in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Europe and America. Evan has previously spent a year each as Herdegen Fellow in the History of Scientific Information at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, course developer for an online education startup, and marketeer for a leading purveyor of collectible figurines. He lives in Newark, NJ.

Jenna Healey

Jenna is a Ph.D. candidate in the Program for the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. She is interested in the cultural history of biomedicine in the late 20th century, with a focus on reproductive medicine and technologies. Her dissertation explores the connection between teenage pregnancy and delayed childbearing and their relation to changes in the American political and economic landscape. Previous research projects include a history of the American childfree movement of the 1970s, a study of masculinity and testicular injections in late 19th century America, and the history of animal psychology in early 20th century France. Even though she writes about American science, Jenna is a proud Canadian who grew up just north of the Toronto. When not writing, she enjoys dancing, museums, and making puns.

Meridith Beck Sayre

I completed my PhD in History of Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2014. Currently, I am a CLIR postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Early Modern Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, where I work on the Chymistry of Isaac Newton project. I also contribute to a variety of other projects related to scholarly editions, data curation, and the digital humanities. My scholarly interests range widely, but include book history, the history of the social sciences, early-modern astronomy, and the history of scholarly practices, such as annotation.

David Singerman

David is a historian of science, technology, and Atlantic capitalism in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In 2014-15 he is a postdoctoral fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, having just received his PhD from MIT's Program in History, Anthropology, and STS. His dissertation, "Inventing Purity in the Atlantic Sugar World, 1860-1930," showed how the idea that commodities like sugar could be reduced to measurable chemical essences was used by factory owners to delegitimize forms of artisanal and craft knowledge. Its final chapter, which followed allegations of fraud in the New York sugar trade will become the core of a book manuscript about science, commodities, and corruption in nineteenth-century America. His dissertation research in the US, Scotland, and Puerto Rico was supported by the NSF, the Social Science Research Council, and the Chemical Heritage Foundation, among others. From time to time, he has been known to race bicycles, and to work on an STS study of doping in professional cycling.

*********************

We hope you'll follow along as we explore this new means of community-building for historians of science in America, broadly-defined.